Zombicide Review

Zombicide is awesome. the only bad thing i can say is that i missed the season 3 kickstarter by about a week so couldn’t get free stuff! Have made up for that by KSing Rum n Bones!

Having played a quick game of the original i went and bought Season 2 (prison Outbreak) and got the other 2 boxes for christmas.

So what’s in the box (es)?

Boards to build a small town (or mall or prison), Hero figures and lots of plastic zombies, cards for equipment and zombie spawns and counters. All of the components are of very high quality.

Setup?

Setup is reasonably quick. Pick a mission, setup according to the mission and pick characters. Alternatively you can make your own missions, either off the cuff which is very quick and easy to do, or using the mission generator from the zombicide website. It’s worth pointing out that on the website and BGG there is lots of cool extra stuff to download.

In Play

The game plays very sstraightforwardly TherZombicidee are a few rules to check like cars and priorities but basically your models get a few actions to move, search and attack and then the zombies all spawn and shuffle towards you. You have to roll to hit with better weapons giving more dice or lower to-hit numbers, while the zombies simply do a point of damage each. Since you can only take two hits if you get swarmed you are dead! IT sounds easy but the amount of zombies, harder and faster zombies, random amounts of spawns and extra goes for the zombies makes it hard. The amount of times the game goes to the wire is impressive. Characters also level up during a mission but then the zombies spawn worse to even it up. Games vary in length from 45 mins to hours, depending on luck and mission.

Summary

Looks great, plays quick, lots of fun. The only downside is there is no real mechanism to use characters from one game to another. You could keep xp, but then the zombies would be harder from the off…With the expansions adding new twists it is definitely worth getting.